Boissy d'Anglas has to explain that article 15 was about slavery

The 1795 constitution replaced the 1794 decree with a clause saying a person may hire out time and services but cannot sell himself or be sold, and that his person is not alienable property. Slavery is not mentioned. The article shows why this mattered by noting that the meaning of the clause came up in debate and needed clarification from the floor. Recast as a restriction on freedom of contract rather than a protection of individual liberty, the ban borrows the vocabulary of natural law arguments that had historically been used to defend slavery, since those arguments assumed a right to sell oneself. The effect was to sever the ban from the insurgency in Saint-Domingue that had forced it, and to reopen the question of how competing universal rights, especially property against liberty, should be balanced.

The French traveller Moreau de Saint-Mery published the first volume of his description of the French part of Hispaniola in 1797. He had presided over the electors of Paris in July 1789. His account of the rites and beliefs of enslaved people is the earliest to come near what was actually happening, and he still condemned what he had watched as a kind of bacchanal that ended in disgusting prostitution. He noted that the participants were Arada people, from the town of Allada in Dahomey, and that they lived by the rules of their religion. Worship centred on dances around a snake kept in a wired box on an altar, from which the faithful were said to gain knowledge of past and future. A goat was killed and its blood poured over those present, who swore to stay faithful. He described the trance that followed without a word for what it was.

About fifty enslaved people of the De Knip plantation refused to work in apparent protest at a specific infringement of the usual daily routines, and marched off to neighbouring estates. Within two days some two thousand of the island's twelve thousand enslaved inhabitants were in revolt and had won their first engagements against the white, coloured and black militias. Oostindie is careful about causes. A Dutch and Spanish treaty had effectively closed the escape route to Coro, which may have added to the ferment, and there may have been another drought and food shortage, but the archives do not let him decide whether the revolt was a conspiracy from the start or grew spontaneously. Negotiations in late August failed, and one of the leaders had taken the name Toussaint.

Yellow fever killed three thousand five hundred or more people in Philadelphia in 1797. Most physicians who could leave the city did leave. One who stayed was Felix Pascalis, who had arrived in the United States in 1793 as a refugee from the Caribbean and had treated fever patients at Benjamin Rush's house on Walnut Street during the epidemic of that year. His book on the 1797 outbreak argued against the common opinion that the disease had been carried in on human bodies aboard ships from Saint-Domingue. He allowed that ships brought it, and held that it moved through wood and air rather than from person to person, rising as putrid exhalations from the timber wharves along the city's two rivers as they dried out. His recommendation was to replace the wharves with stone and coat the stone with tar once a year. The theory was wrong. The habit of plotting cases against places became part of epidemiology.